Intentionally or not, movies in the past year or so have set about tackling the questions of Occupy Wall Street and/or our general economic gloom. The Dark Knight Rises pitted Batman's Have against Bane's Have-Not, the conclusion of which was... well, no one's quite sure about that. Margin Call dramatized a day in the lives of investment bankers who talk like Wall Street Journal op-eds. Spike Lee, to no one's particular surprise, has sketched the effects of our growing economic inequality on a Brooklyn neighborhood in Red Hook Summer. And in next month's Arbitrage, Richard Gere, in the grand tradition of actors giving moral complexity to assholes, will play a hedge-funder who's basically Bernie Madoff. They all take a cue from Wall Street, the movie that made wariness of investment bankers a social norm and now looks all the more naive for it.

Thankfully, then, there is David Cronenberg. From Videodrome to Crash to A History of Violence, the director has never felt the need to seriously address the real-world concerns of the day, or even adhere to conventional narrative logic. (Holly Hunter wrecks her car, then masturbates? Why not?) His new movie, Cosmopolis, is a great send-up of our economic anxiety. It's true that the characters talk endlessly, as they do in Don DeLillo's 2003 book, but none of it amounts to much. It's empty banter, a parody of boardroom jargon. Robert Pattinson as an even less likable Bud Fox type named Eric Packer (the actor's flat, charmless American accent has never been better suited to a role) asks his employees inane questions they can't possibly hope to answer, like "Why are airports called airports?" They refuse to respond out of fear they'll lose his respect.

All the talk avoids the real subject, which for Cronenberg is never far from death. As Pattinson's Eric loses his personal fortune over the course of a day, his life becomes a series of escalating body-horror gags. There are two security threats against him, one of which turns out to be a literal pie in the face. The best joke, though, is a scene in which he receives a prostate exam while discussing the yuan. (For Cronenberg, that's "sexual tension.") By the end, Eric has become so disillusioned with himself that he sees violence as a way out. He shoots a hole through his hand just so that he can "feel something."

Movies are very bad at explaining our national problems to us (see: any film by Michael Moore). At their best, they can only make those problems more vivid. Cosmopolis takes an unremarkable proposal, that our economic system is hurtling toward chaos, to its logical conclusion. (The opening shot of a Pollock-style drip painting in the making is a sign of what's to come.) It's effective for all the reasons, as propaganda, it's not: It's messy and goofy and unsettling. It has no clear answers, not even in the brilliant final scene, a confrontation between Pattinson's Eric and a disgruntled former employee played by Paul Giamatti, the central question of which seems to be, Why do some people accumulate massive amounts of wealth, while others are left to go broke and die? The scene ends, instead, with a loaded gun.

Our own Wall Street becomes more absurd with every day's headlines. It's unclear if anyone really understands it, including the Wall Streeters themselves, though a lot of producers seem to want to try very hard. Cronenberg's outright refusal to negotiate with realism, his fervent imagination, may be the more appropriate impulse. To get to the heart of a spectacle, sometimes, requires more spectacle.